Gerlinde Mautner

"You don't take a photograph," the American photographer Ansel Adams said, "you make it". This has always resonated strongly with me – as an (amateur) photographer and as a (professional) linguist working in a constructivist paradigm. In both capacities, I am interested in looking beyond the immediately obvious, in capturing detail, patterns and texture. Whether we look at the material world or at language, 'reality' is inevitably changed by the very act of looking. Yet, for all the parallels, gaining insight(s) means something rather different to the photographer and the linguist. And the differences in themselves can promote creativity.

Gerlinde Mautner is Professor of English Business Communication at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Visiting Professor at Durham Business School, UK, and Vice-President for Humanities and Social Sciences of Austria’s largest research funding organisation, FWF. She pursues research interests located at the interface of language, society, business and the law. Since the mid-nineteen nineties, her work has also had a strong methodological focus, concerned in particular with the relationship between corpus linguistics and discourse studies. Her hobbies include photography and papercraft.